Wake Forest art professor to discuss book on JFK and American culture

David Lubin, Charlotte C. Weber Professor of Art at Wake Forest University, will speak about his prize-winning book "Shooting Kennedy: JFK and the Culture of Images" at the Z. Smith Reynolds Library Oct. 25 on the Wake Forest campus.

Lubin's talk will begin at 4 p.m. in Room 204 of the library. The event is free and open to the public.

In "Shooting Kennedy," Lubin explores famous images of John F. Kennedy and his family and their connections to American culture.

"The Kennedy images derive their power in good measure from their ability to activate latent memories of other powerful images in the histories of art and popular culture," Lubin says.

In the book, he draws from Hollywood films, TV sitcoms, neoclassical painting, modern art and designer fashion to show how the public came to identify personally with the Kennedys. He places the best-known photographs and film images of the president and his family in historical and cultural context and uses them to examine postwar America.

Lubin began the book after teaching a seminar at Wake Forest in spring 2000 on important photographs of the 20th century. It won the Smithsonian American Art Museum's 2004 Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art.

Lubin has taught at Wake Forest since 1999 and is also the author of "Titanic" (1999), "Picturing a Nation: Art and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America" (1994) and "Act of Portrayal: Eakins, Sargent, James" (1985).